News

January 13, 2011

Prof. Zhigang Deng, Assistant Professor of Computer Science and the Founding Director of UH Computer Graphics and Interactive Media Lab, wins the Nokia Open Innovation Research Award to develop a novel gesture interface based, mixed reality social interaction game on mobile. This award comes with $30K unrestricted research cash gifts plus donation of 15 latest Nokia cell phones N900s. Through this award, UH has started to become a member of the Nokia open innovation university research partners, by joining a list of Stanford, UC Berkeley, MIT, University of Southern California, ETH, etc.

In this project, through a close collaboration with the leading researchers at the Nokia Research Center at Palo Alto, Prof. Deng and his research team at the UH CGIM Lab will work on a gesture-based human computer interface and further use it to design a group-based social interaction game on Nokia Smartphones to validate the effectiveness and usability of the developed human computer interface.

Designing immersive, graphical, technology-mediated social interaction systems including innovative human computer interfaces on mobile has been one of emerging yet focused research directions in the UH CGIM Lab. Along this line, Prof. Deng and his research team have started to receive research support and collaborations from leading industry giants including research awards from Google and Nokia. It is anticipated that more industry partners will show interests and may join the UH research efforts down the road.